Search Results

This chapter considers how Amis sought to define a new contemporary decorum for a fundamentally indecorous age. Through close readings of Amis’s particular rhythms and rhetorical traits, it shows how Amis experiments with tone and awryness to create an active mimesis that both reflects and critiques contemporary excesses; and how Amis forges an ‘adjustment-style’ in order to individualize his reader. This chapter also shows how Amis pursues similar concerns to humanistic thinkers like Martha Nussbaum and Wayne C. Booth, while replacing character and human interest with style interest, therefore evolving a provocative literary ethics that rejects the centrality of character. This all builds towards a close comparison of The Information and Yellow Dog, and their varying methods of negotiating the general and the particular.

This chapter examines Martin Amis' The Second Plane, which is a collection of most of his journalism and stories that were inspired by the attacks. It examines how Amis' criticism and fiction are intertwined, as well as his use of parody in ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’. This chapter views The Second Plane as a fascinating reflection of a writer who is struggling to find ways to speak about the event.

The study of autobiography has been resurgent in recent decades, and the genre is often now discussed by historians, literary critics and others alongside biographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, and reminiscences – as well as works more conventionally considered ‘history’ or ‘fiction’ -- under the banner of life writing (the term ‘self-life-writing’ is Avrom Fleishman’s). One reason for this is the rise of interdisciplinary areas of study that have found autobiography to be a particularly useful form of writing, and so have accorded it a distinctive place in the study of both authenticity and alterity. In the 1970s, women’s studies, American studies, ethnic and black studies all started to turn to autobiography for voices of ‘experience’ from within, as James Olney sees it. Or, as Martin Amis puts it in his own Experience: ‘what everyone has in them, these days, is not a novel but a memoir. We live in an age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de Coeur. Nothing, for now, can compete with experience – so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed.’

This chapter studies Martin Amis' remark that there is a yawning gap, which separates writers' lives from their literary works. He claims that “the life doesn't shape the writing, nor do the moral lineaments of the life contaminate the work. They are separate things.” Denying this claim is the biography's crime since biographers are in business to say the two are “the same thing, or that they overlap.” He further states that “being more interested in the writer than the writing is just eternal human vulgarity.” These forms of contempt for literary biography had placed him firmly in the critical tradition that warned about the intentional fallacy.

Chapter 4 discusses recent fiction and autofiction by canonical male authors, considering the relationship between masculinity and shame, and highlighting the persistent association between shame and femininity in works by male authors. The textual analyses of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal (2001), Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (2010), and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle II: A Man in Love (2009/2014) suggest that, too often, men’s writing of and on shame seeks to disavow that shame, to project it onto female bodies, and/or to make of its confession a kind of heroism. The Roth and Amis novels are read as displacing male shamefulness (particularly, but not only, sexual shame) onto vulnerable female bodies – bodies that are sometimes also racially othered. The reading of Knausgaard then shows how that text, despite evincing an unusual perspicacity on the subject of masculine shame, ultimately transforms its ‘struggle’ with shame into a literary struggle for ‘authenticity’ and leaves intact the association of shamefulness and the feminine. An analysis of Knausgaard’s critical reception considers also how his positioning as (exceptional, paradigmatic, Proustian) Author counters his narrative of shame and failure with one of literary ‘greatness’, remasculinising him in the process.

The concluding chapter considers how the legal and political arguments for detention camps in the US-led ‘war on terror’ draw on the rhetoric of emergency to reinforce the necessity for broader police and/or military powers, and to justify measures that not only contravene the principles of international human rights legislation, but which also resemble the legal, political and military techniques of European colonial powers in the twentieth century. Beginning with a discussion of the legal regime which enabled the detention of ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantánamo Bay, this chapter proceeds to consider how Muslims have been represented in the ‘post-9/11’ fiction of Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. In so doing, I try to address to what extent the ‘post-9/11’ novel participates in the dominant discourse of terrorism. As a counterpoint to such representations, the chapter then moves to consider how contemporary fiction by Muslim writers such as Mohsin Hamid and Kamila Shamsie questions and complicates the prevailing tropes and narratives of militant Islam that frame the justification of emergency measures in the ‘war on terror’.

This chapter involves the readings of Graham Swift's Waterland and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow. Waterland is a novel full of explicit theorisation that finds its application in the storytelling itself: a novel which explores the theme of time through the temporal logic of storytelling. A discussion which aims to explain what it is that the contemporary novel has expressed, if anything, about time, is provided. In Amis's Time's Arrow, the disjunction between the narrator and the narrated is not a difference of location in time, but one of the experience of the direction of time. The effect that time reversal seems least in control of is the relationship between the meaning of words and the forward direction of time. Time's Arrow offers a striking example of a contradiction between what the novel does and what it says.

This final chapter considers how far the broader arguments made about style in the previous chapters could be applied to other economies of novelistic prose (e.g. minimalism), before arguing that excess enacts its own peculiar and ethically enriching powers of thought and perception that cannot be so fully activated in a plainer style. To evidence this, it offers quick readings of Burgess, Carter, and Amis’s plainest books, showing how the ethical power of their characteristic styles is muted when the excess is tamed. Excess is shown to be both the product and regulator of the intellectual and political divisions that animate their thinking (especially between the conservative and the transformative), and the key to how their texts affect and engage the reader.

An English computer whizz invented the twenty-first century. This, of course, is a fantastic claim, but Tim Berners-Lee rightly gets credited for inventing the World Wide Web, which became operational in the 1990s, and which quickly began to shape the way people around the globe learn, communicate, trade, debate, are manipulated, scrutinised and entertained, fall in and out of love, reinvent their identities, engage in politics, and indulge their fantasies and sexual desires. Such a state of affairs might have seemed impossible, or indeed unthinkable, for much of the twentieth century, the stuff of science fiction, although another Englishman had proposed something similar in the late 1930s.